Sir Cecil Smith-Rhodes
The founder and greatest member of the prestigious Smith-Rhodes family in White Howondaland. Earned the nearest thing to eternal fame by conquering a large unclaimed part of Howondaland (the fact its black inhabitants already claimed it apparently didn't count) and annexing it as the province of Smith-Rhodesia. He went on to play a part in the great Zulu War and, twenty or so years later, in the War of Independence from Ankh-Morpork. (Known in Ankh-Morpork as The Boor War). His statue now has pride of place in New Scrote, or Scrotesbury, the administrative capital of the province. As a footnote to the story ☀[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11536013/1/Hyperemesis-gravidarum https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11536013/1/Hyperemesis-gravidarum], '' it is revealed that the great Howondalandian adventurer was born in the Central Continent, in the village of Scrote not far from Ankh-Morpork. For the first fourteen or so years, the boy born as Cecil Smith worked his way up to being a swineherd. He married a Miss Roydes, daughter of the village blacksmith, distinguished for her good looks and fiery red hair. The two scraped together the ten dollar fare and emigrated to Howondaland. The Smith-Rhodes family history (the new name is a result of mis-transcription by a disinterested immigration clerk) claims that Cecil worked hard as a sailor and merchant venturer, with a sharp eye for trading opportunities that saw him accumulate a steady small fortune. A shrewd reading of geology and surveying textbooks led to what other people considered to be some truly appalling land purchases, of apparently barren and poor-quality land unsuited for farming. And then he started paying people to dig. Harvesting the first gold and diamonds to be found in Rimwards Howondaland for some centuries made him seriously rich. This gave him the finance to move on to Stage Two. Recruiting and outfitting a small army, taking care to treat the majority of black and coloured soldiers with fairness and respect, Cecil Smith-Rhodes moved Hubwards into an as yet unexplored region which was a small independent country, as yet unthreatened by Zulus on one side or Matabels on the other. The people of Rumbabwe were informed they were now under new management. Several battles followed. But the province of Smith-Rhodesia had now been won for what was still, just about, the Ankh-Morporkian Empire. The obligatory knighthood followed for a man who was now styled Sir Cecil Smith-Rhodes, adopting his wife's name alongside his own, taking advantage of the mis-spelling of his the name on arrival. Given limited political autonomy, the colony of Rimwards Howondaland offered him political office, on the grounds it was safest to get somebody like this inside the machine from whence he could piss out, rather than vice-versa. He never forgot his birth in Scrote, and, after flirting with calling the capital of his new nation Scrotesbury, ''he settled on New Scrote. ''He was active on both the Zulu War and later in the War of Independence, and died shortly afterwards , passing the mantle of Family head to his oldest son Cecil. The third son Charles, the only other of his four sons to provide male grandchildren, married a Kerrigian Boor girl with flaming red hair called Johanna van der Kaiboetje. She became the first Johanna Smith-Rhodes and started a naming tradition for the eldest daughter in every new generation that ran down this line. As well as assuring that flaming fiery red hair (and hair-trigger tempers) would be the norm along this trunk of the family tree. His son John fathered only two daughters, and Richard remained childless. A discussion of the family history is ''here.